Dao-le!

I had a cabbie the other day with the impressively aged registration number 0347**(yes, it's about time I tried to revive interest in my 'Search for Beijing's longest-serving cabbie' feature). He told me he'd been in the job for 21 years. (Unfortunately, he seemed to be one of those drivers who've been hopelessly outgrown by this crazy city: completely bewildered by the strange new metropolis that has sprung up in that time, and unsure of his geography outside of a few well-travelled districts. The garish novelty of the Haoyun Jie bar strip was completely unknown to him, and even 3rd Ringroad landmarks like the Hilton, Kunlun, and Kempinski Hotels seemed to evoke little recognition.)

The most memorable oddity of this cab ride, though, was the fact that the chap had chosen to insert his registration card into its dashboard display upside down. I'm always a bit suspicious when the card isn't easily visible (dirty display pocket, excessively sun-faded print, card missing from pocket altogether, or being substituted by an illegible photocopy - I've had all of these more than once), but after a little theatrical neck-craning I satisfied myself that my driver was indeed the same guy pictured on the card, the one with the veteran registration number.

Why had he done this, I wonder? He was plainly used to being asked about it, and seemed to find it amusing in some obscure way; but he didn't offer any explanation, and my Chinese was too limited to probe for one.

I wondered if he was repeating the visual 'pun' invariably used at Chinese New Year with the posters or paper cutouts of the character fu (good fortune) - 福 - pasted on people's front doors upside down: 倒 (upside down) and 到 (arrive) are, as well as being almost identical in written form, perfect homophones (dao, with the 4th [falling] tone]); and thus, putting your 福 on the door the wrong way up is considered to express the auspicious thought "good fortune is here!"

As it happens, 到 (with the addition of the intensive particle 了 to indicate a completed action: dao-le) is also what you tell your taxi driver when you see your destination going past.

I wonder if my long-serving but not especially knowledgeable cabbie thought this was a witty way of announcing to his passengers "Wang [not his actual name] is here for you!" Maybe so.

Postscript: My curmudgeonly erstwhile drinking companion, Big Frank, had very little patience with Beijing's cab drivers. But then, we all got into more trouble with taxis in our early days, because we didn't know our way around either. And I think there was a spotty patch in the early Noughties where the Supervision Bureau didn't seem to be doing anything effective to vet the standard of newly recruited drivers. The situation seems very much better to me now. Anyway, Big Frank used to joke sourly that the Beijing taxi drivers' test to qualify for their licence should be nicknamed not The Knowledge (as the London cabbie's notoriously demanding exam is known) but The Ignorance; anyone, he suggested, who was foolhardy enough to admit some slight familiarity with The Forbidden City or Wangfujing Street or the Kempinski Hotel - or any other significant landmark - would be immediately disqualified. Honestly, 4 or 5 years ago, that idea didn't seem so far-fetched.